Can you still buy those spring-driven hand-grip finger strengthener exercising gizmos? Did anyone ever try them, and if so, did they help?

way back when I was just starting... ...my grandpa (who didn't play guitar, but had it amongst his other arm exercise equipment, he was an old trucker who kept a buff physique and well defined arms and forearms into his 80s) It did help get me to the point I could play an F chord on an old, high actioned acoustic.

I guess removing the spring cover on a Strat allows the back of the guitar to vibrate in its own way instead of having one part tied artificially to another. Or maybe the speed of sound is different in wood and plastic and it messes with some kind of phase relationship. Or maybe I'm just hearing things.

__________________But godliness with contentment is great gain (1 Tim 6:6)

Steve "Directional audio cables...because of crystal structure alignment? " ... how marvellous. Presumably people made money out of this from others who haven't heard of alternating current? to_be_released, how does PCB vs. tagstrip (or whatever) work in a pedal-sized setting? can you link to that discussion or is it against forum rules?

How about "an amp's no good if it has a PCB; the only way to build an amp is eyelet boards / tag-strip / point-to-point " ?

Haha!

Everybody knows this! You gotta have some room around those caps and resistors for them to breathe electrons, ions and quarks ... otherwise you stifle the tone.

AND, you need a top electrode for your preamp tube ... so the tone flows down into the amp.

But seriously, this little 5W is still one of my best-sounding amps. Hooked up to a roomy 12X1 cab, it fills our 1,100 sq. ft. meeting room nicely. (before the Safety Board goes berserk, this usually has a punched metal Faraday Cage on top )

Everybody knows this! You gotta have some room around those caps and resistors for them to breathe electrons, ions and quarks ... otherwise you stifle the tone.

AND, you need a top electrode for your preamp tube ... so the tone flows down into the amp.

But seriously, this little 5W is still one of my best-sounding amps. Hooked up to a roomy 12X1 cab, it fills our 1,100 sq. ft. meeting room nicely. (before the Safety Board goes berserk, this usually has a punched metal Faraday Cage on top )

Presently the preamp is a Haltron 6J7GT, the power tube is a big-bottle Canadian Westinghouse 6V6G and rectifier a GE 5Y3. This is based on a 5C2 Princeton circuit, but I later took out the tone-sucker pot. The original preamp was a 6SL7, but I wanted the visual effect of a glass tube ... and think the GT sounds better.